Grail

hung with flowers Danilaw did not recognize—curtained two padded alcoves lined with fluffy blankets and pillows absorbent, springy, and soft.

After the Angel left, Amanda took a slow spin at the center of the room, diffuse light dappling her hair. “I don’t know how we’ll adapt,” she said, giving Danilaw a glance through her eyelashes he could only regard as flirtatious.

He smiled back and plunked himself on the mossy edge of the nearer bunk. The tough, yielding little plants were warm above and cool below, exactly as if they had been warmed by the sun. He held his hand out into those spots of light that had scattered across Amanda’s head and shoulders. They shifted, the vining leaves draping the ceiling turning in the breeze from the ventilation ducts. Full-spectrum, warm against his skin.

Behind the vines, rusty stains climbed the mesh the plants twined through, and Danilaw could see where centuries of growth and death had stretched the holes and torn the strands.

Danilaw felt his face prickle. He took a breath and let it out again—moist, verdant, and warm.

This world was old and worn. And if they could give this much space to two itinerant diplomats, it was not as full of strangers as Danilaw had feared. Actually, the near emptiness of all those corridors was beginning to sink in and make sense.

“They are underpopulated,” he said, with a gesture to this space, empty and just waiting.

Amanda, frowning, nodded and glanced aside. For a moment, they were in silent understanding. It had been a long, hard road in coming here. What compassionate human being could ask them to move on?

Yet what merely natural world could assimilate everything that surrounded him now without being consumed or destroyed?

Danilaw got up, crossed springy turf, and took Amanda’s hand. She turned to him, startled; he hoped it would look to the observers he presumed existed as if they were secret lovers. He couldn’t risk speaking; he could not even risk spelling against her palm.

Probably every word that Danilaw and Amanda said to one another was being recorded, every gesture analyzed. Probably, they had no privacy at all. These were not people, Bakare thought, who were likely to discard any available advantage. They were not stupid, they were not prone to losing for its own sake, and they were accustomed to constant struggle.

He compared that to his own people, who were no longer accustomed to playing to win, and felt a chill.

So he looked in her eyes and thought, as hard as he could, We cannot allow these people to make landfall, and hoped the message would be read in the cast of his features, the alteration in his pheromones.

And maybe it was, because she held the eye contact for almost ten seconds, and after she looked down, she nodded.

17 who ruined all of us

Love, that is first and last of all things made,

The light that has the living world for shade.

—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, Tristram of Lyonesse

When the aliens had left and the rubble of the state dinner was cleared, Perceval reclaimed her Bridge and —mostly—her solitude. Her First Mate stayed with her; her Angel was already in residence, here as everywhere. But the rest of her executive crew knew when to let well enough alone.

This was one of those times, and though she cursed herself for being so predictable, she was grateful of their solicitude.

She stood behind the green bank of her command chair, hands resting on the back, and let herself lean. Hard, until her fingers dented the sod, and the scent of crushed violets and bluets surrounded her.

“Ariane had a backup,” she said.

Tristen was behind her, and she had stripped off her armor and returned it to its locker, but the rasp of his hair told her he nodded. “The signature is … unmistakable. Even Gerald, who ruined all of us, drew a few lines. Ariane kills whatever crosses her path because it pleases her to exert that kind of power, and then justifies it later.”

“The massacre,” Nova said, in that voice that reminded Perceval a little too fiercely of Dust, and his libraries of literature and history and ghosts, “is a tradition of tyrants from immemorial history. Destroy the enemy unto the last child, and sow the earth with salt around his bones.”

“We are the worst monsters there are.” Perceval worked her fingers together, twisting them, massaging the discomfort from her hands. It was the pain of exhaustion, and not even her colony could banish it entirely.

“We are the worst monsters there are,” Tristen agreed. “But we are all we have.”

He came up beside her and nudged her over. The Captain’s chair was broad enough for them to lean on side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Perceval breathed in his warmth and the animal comfort of his presence, the smell of his sweat and pheromones. She let her temple fall against his shoulder and felt the Angel, half solid and half real, upon her other side.

“The Fisher King’s folk. We are their worst nightmare,” she said. “We are the thing they changed themselves utterly to escape from.”

“And they are the thing we changed ourselves utterly to avoid becoming.” Tristen’s voice was deep, mellifluous, a little scratchy. “What are you going to do about Ariane?”

Ariane, her beloved’s half sister. Ariane, the worst of the Conns. Ariane, whose preserved and flattened ghost inhabited Perceval’s own mind, controlled and caged away, yet who seemed to have left another ghost, another revenant, loose in the world to wreak havoc and spread despair. If she had done so, she had wiped her own memory of the backup, or Perceval would have inherited that also.

Although Perceval had to admit, she had failed somewhat, out of distaste. She had not interrogated Ariane as completely as she should have, and even if overwritten with something innocuous to cover the hole, an erased memory could potentially leave a discontinuity.

That might tell them when she had made the backup. Which would in turn tell them where to start looking.

“She’s in my head,” Perceval said. “I suppose I shall have to find out what she knows about it. But I want you and Benedick here when I do it.”

Tristen nodded again. “Benedick will want a piece of her—for Caitlin’s sake and for Rien’s. And for you as well. But he’ll also know he’s emotionally compromised, and he won’t ask to be sent after her.”

“You think I should send him after her anyway.”

“No one is more dogged than Benedick. Or more dangerous when roused.”

“Tristen Tiger is,” she said, reaching across her own chest and left arm to brush her fingertips across his shoulder.

He leaned into the contact. “Tristen Conn is old and tired, My Lady. His claws are blunted and his teeth show yellow in receding gums. But in so long as you need one, I shall be thy tiger. I will find where Ariane has gone to ground, and I will reclaim your mother’s blade, and I will find what she plans for the Bible.”

He paused and took a breath, another. Knowing Tristen, knowing how he nerved himself to speak, Perceval gave him time. Finally, he began, “The Fisher King and his folk …”

“I know,” she said. “Every day they spend with us, the welcome will grow a little cooler, the willingness to share their world a little more remote. If we wish their permission, we will have to change to suit them.”

“It would disappoint the Builders,” Nova said, not so much startling Perceval as reminding her of her presence.